Peter Oram

My father Peter Oram, a leading expert on international development, has died aged 87. An authority on crop and livestock management technologies, practices and policies, with a regional specialism in the Middle East and north Africa, he was an impassioned advocate for agricultural investment as a means of improving the lives of the rural poor.

Peter was born in Gloucester. On leaving school, his first job was as a Midland Bank clerk, and he spent much of his spare time collecting insects, fossils and butterflies along the Jurassic hills of the south coast. During the second world war, Peter served as an officer with the South Lancashire Regiment. Considered exceptionally bright, he was seconded to General Montgomery's office as an aide de camp, ferrying dispatches by motorcycle. He later served in north Africa and, after the war, in Palestine. Despite a promising army career, he decided to study agronomy at Cambridge University, taking his advanced degree with honours in 1949.

He then worked for Plant Protection Ltd, a subsidiary of ICI, advising farmers on the use of fertilisers and insecticides. A few years later, he joined the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), returning to north Africa to direct a group of remote crop research stations in Cyrenaica, Libya. He later established an HQ for the north African region at Tripoli, before being posted to FAO headquarters in Rome as a high-level adviser to Middle Eastern governments.

In the early 1960s, Peter returned to England, buying a farm in Kent while working for Borax Consolidated plc. His love of Rome eventually drew him back to the FAO, where he became assistant director of the policy advisory bureau and director of research. In 1976, he was asked to join the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC, and in 1979 became its deputy director-general, a post he held until 1984. On his retirement, he became IFPRI's first research fellow emeritus, working as a senior consultant until he developed amytrophic lateral sclerosis.

He will be remembered for his passion and dedication to his work, as well as for his humour, generosity, incisive mind and boundless curiosity of people, places and nature. He is survived by his second wife, Catherine, their sons Alexander and Julian, and by Michael, the son of his first marriage to Dorothy.

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